In their poor, Communist country, Romania's computer curious built an underground industry.

BUCHAREST, Romania—Mihai Moldovanu grabs the cardboard box with the enthusiasm of a man from the future who’s opening a time capsule.

“Maybe it could still work,” he tells me.

He dusts it off with his hands. Inside the box rests the computer he built for himself in high school. He hasn’t switched it on in 10, maybe 20 years. This summer, when moving from one apartment to another, he stumbled upon the box. “I need to find a charger and an old TV set. It’s going to be tricky to revive it.”

An athletic geek now in his mid-40s, Moldovanu has always been crafting DIY projects. In the local open-source community, he is better known as one of the creators of the first Romanian Linux distribution, TFM, that’s still used by local companies. His 9-to-5 job is that of a System Administrator for a fin-tech company in Bucharest.

What Moldovanu’s holding isn’t some hobbyist kit potentially familiar to tech tinkerers back in the states. In the mid-1980s, Romania was a poverty-stricken, Communist country. So like a handful of his fellow students with a similar undeniable passion for computing, Moldovanu soon became one of only a few dozen underground computer builders in the country. They illegally manufactured computers using parts smuggled from factories and heaps of manually soldered wires. But armed with very few resources and plenty of creativity, people like Moldovanu soon fueled an underground hardware industry that would birth some of the country’s best future tech professionals.

Mihai Moldovanu revisiting the Cobra he learned to build underground in 1980s Romania.

Adi Dabu

"It was a highly illegal operation. And we knew this very well,” Moldovanu tells Ars. “But to us, it didn’t matter. We were super excited to turn a pile of parts into a cool project.”

Adi Dabu

Illegally connecting Romania

To a young Moldovanu, computers were magic. The country he grew up in barely had access to landline telephones and black-and-white TV sets, and he rarely came across Western goods. Romania had its borders closed tightly. For the average citizen, there were no opportunities to travel or to receive accurate news regarding what was the state of technology in the West.

Instead, during the last years under dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu in the late 1980s, people would wake up at 5am to stand in line in front of stores for their modest food rations. Electricity was often cut to save money; heating was, too. This was the environment when the underground tech industry started: around 1985, four years before the bloody Romanian revolution that knocked down Communism.

Back then, Romania’s hardware industry mainly cloned the British Sinclair ZX Spectrum, a machine released in the UK in 1982. This device was copied all across Central and Eastern Europe. The ZX Spectrum was an 8-bit personal computer built around a Zilog Z80 A CPU running a BASIC interpreter, an easy-to-use programming language widespread on microcomputers at that time. It used a TV set as a display and audio cassettes for storage.

Among the clones manufactured by the Communists was the Cobra or CoBra. The name stands for COmputere BRAsov, with Brasov being the town in central Romania where these machines were assembled to be used by enterprises. Of course, ordinary people couldn’t buy them—which is what first led several students at the Politehnica University of Bucharest deciding to build them themselves.

“It was a highly illegal operation. And we knew this very well,” Moldovanu tells me. “But to us, it didn’t matter. We were super excited to turn a pile of parts into a cool project.”

If militia officers caught Moldovanu and colleagues while they were selling computes, however, it'd matter. The authorities could seize the students’ electronics, make them pay fines, and could expel them from the university for starters.

Given how dire daily life was for Romanians at the time, something as little as a pack of Western cigarettes would buy anything that could be smuggled from a factory. So the Politehnica students leveraged their resources to obtain some Cobra motherboards and independently started to build computers on top of those. Soon, an entire supply chain was formed. Electronics dealers came to the campus with computer parts, LEDs, and resistors, which they sold in bulk. The students became fond of Cobras, as they featured not only BASIC but also CP/M, an operating system created for Intel 8080/85-based microcomputers.

The builders used whatever was available on the black market; no two computers ever seemed to come out alike. Lucky owners fit their Cobras into cases from another Romanian ZX Spectrum clone, the HC. Others used manufactured metal or wooden boxes.

“I didn’t care about the case,” Moldovanu says. “Most of the time, my computer worked with its parts spread on my desk. If I broke it, I would fix it myself.”

In this closed Communist country with choice regulated by the state, Cobras gave their owners some feeling of independence and rebellion. “The fact that you could play the game you wanted, when you wanted, gave you the illusion of choosing for yourself,” Moldovanu says. Three decades later, he still knows by heart Highway Encounter, Chuckie Egg, and Nether Earth, which featured Isometric 3D Graphics, meaning that it was 2D, but looked 3D-ish. Moldovanu was amazed at the graphics, and so he began studying the algorithm to learn how it was possible to achieve them.

I highly recommend watching "Chuck Norris vs. Communism" on Netflix. It's a look at the underground VCR/VHS market in Romania during the Eastern Bloc years that provides great insight into what it was like living in an Eastern Bloc country.

My brain had issues trying to parse that sentence. Multi-word adjectives need to be hyphenated.

[Corrected:] style guides advice that compound adjectives should usually by hyphenated in British English, but in American English one need only bother if there is potential ambiguity. So in terms of whether the rule is absolute, international opinion is split.

[earlier, opposite assertion: Americans hyphenate, Brits don't]

Otherwise: I've encountered a Hobbit, which is a bit of a curio for being a Russian Spectrum clone that was briefly imported and distributed back in the UK as the discontinuation of the Spectrum happened not too long after trade between east and west really started to open up. Other clones, such as the Pentagon, continue to cast a long shadow in emulator presence.

I feel sorry for anybody that had access only to the Spectrum version of Chuckie Egg though. Obviously the real-momentum Acorn and Amstrad versions are the way to go. And if anybody wants to discuss it, we can probably find a playground somewhere to do so.

This is a fantastic story, and I think ars and the author. It reminds of the old days, soldering together single board computers. The process was, of course, much easier (and not illegal) in the US, but it brings back memories of saving up to buy surplus chips and soldering together little computers. Amazing.

Very interesting read. This kind of DIY spirit is definitely missing in modern society. I wonder, for example, how many perfectly good TV's are thrown away because a single capacitor failed out of warranty.I'm only 33, but I remember in my childhood there were radio/TV repair shops. We had them fix fuzzy video output on our C64 once. Nowadays if some gadget isn't working you just buy a new one.

Very interesting read. This kind of DIY spirit is definitely missing in modern society. I wonder, for example, how many perfectly good TV's are thrown away because a single capacitor failed out of warranty.I'm only 33, but I remember in my childhood there were radio/TV repair shops. We had them fix fuzzy video output on our C64 once. Nowadays if some gadget isn't working you just buy a new one.

Not to dispute your point overmuch, because you're not wrong, but as a vintage arcade collector I'm happy to note there are still TV repair shops. We have resources when we can't figure out how to do our own repairs.

This is a fantastic story, and I think ars and the author. It reminds of the old days, soldering together single board computers. The process was, of course, much easier (and not illegal) in the US, but it brings back memories of saving up to buy surplus chips and soldering together little computers. Amazing.

Yeah, it took me back to the times when some input connection broke on a hand-me-down Commodore 64 motherboard I used to have. Looking at those pictures reminds me of what I saw then (around the early-mid 1980's).

Not NEARLY as cool as building one from scratch, but I do remember playing with BASIC. I wrote a program to determine the minimum acceleration (with deceleration) necessary to get from an orbit around Neptune to Earth in 10 days. (It was for a book I never actually finished - I like to be as accurate about these things as possible when I write.) Keep in mind, all I had for math guides was an older set of encyclopedias and no Internet. It didn't exist back then.

It was 5 point something gees, as I recall, which is survivable, but only just barely. There was also a 10 hour (or so) coasting time (yes, I had that part thrown in for fun), and you were going something like 10-20% the speed of light. It took 2 1/2 hours to get that result. As I recall, I had that computer for like 6 years before my brother took pity on me and sent an old 386. Then I had to hack a cable (he wrote the software) to connect a C64 drive to an IBM parallel port and get all my books translated into something an IBM machine could read (All on 5 1/4 floppies - I had like, 15 books at the time and about 30 floppies to go through).

That's rapidly approaching 40 years ago, isn't it?

Times have changed. I never had the chops this guys have, but I can relate dealing with stuff well before Windows meant anything other than something one simply looked trough.

I was born in Czechoslovakia in 84 so I don't really remember that much from the pre-revolution era. Czechoslovakia was also much better off than Romania at the time so we actually had some clone computers "officially" in homes in the late 80s. I remember my older cousin's "Didaktik" computer. I still marvel at the sound of those keystrokes hehe.

It's what got me into IT in the first place. That any my first 286 dad got for some job in the early 90s.

Reminds me yet again of being 15 years old, building the COSMAC ELF CDP1802-based microcomputer trainer from the Popular Electronics article, getting bored with 256B of RAM, then designing an 8kB 2114-based RAM expansion, UART and RS232/20ma current-loop interface, and saving up for a 2kB integer BASIC interpreter that arrived on 2 2708 1kBx8 EPROMs (which created some consternation on my part, because suddenly I had to come up with +12 and -5 volt supplies for those EPROMs). Then there was the (broken; had to fix the keyboard, first) Teletype model 33ASR, complete with paper tape punch and reader. The I/O for the BASIC interpreter were first entered by hand from front panel switches, then written to paper tape, and thereafter I'd hand-load a 'bootstrap' routine, which would load the BASIC I/O from the paper tape, then jump to the BASIC interpreter proper. Anything I wrote in BASIC was saved to paper tape, because that's what I had at the time. That's when computers were fun. :-)

Very interesting read. This kind of DIY spirit is definitely missing in modern society. I wonder, for example, how many perfectly good TV's are thrown away because a single capacitor failed out of warranty.I'm only 33, but I remember in my childhood there were radio/TV repair shops. We had them fix fuzzy video output on our C64 once. Nowadays if some gadget isn't working you just buy a new one.

Not to dispute your point overmuch, because you're not wrong, but as a vintage arcade collector I'm happy to note there are still TV repair shops. We have resources when we can't figure out how to do our own repairs.

It usually is a cap though.

we have an appliance repair shop here in my city. Not sure what all they repair but they fixed my moms dishwasher before.

Back in commie Yugoslavia things were way more open. Nobody cared if you imported a foreign computer magazine or electronic components, and it was easy to smuggle a Spectrum or a C64 into the country. There was even a Yugoslavia-made computer later called Orao ("eagle"). We had those in elementary school in the 80s, while the teacher had a shiny thing called "Amiga" that we weren't allowed to touch. I might even still have some cassettes with ZX Spectrum games in my room, if anyone is interested.

However, Romania? Those guys are hardcore. Respect. If they started like this, it's not a big surprise that Romania is one of the countries with the fastest growing IT sector in the EU right now.

Very interesting read. This kind of DIY spirit is definitely missing in modern society. I wonder, for example, how many perfectly good TV's are thrown away because a single capacitor failed out of warranty.I'm only 33, but I remember in my childhood there were radio/TV repair shops. We had them fix fuzzy video output on our C64 once. Nowadays if some gadget isn't working you just buy a new one.

Not to dispute your point overmuch, because you're not wrong, but as a vintage arcade collector I'm happy to note there are still TV repair shops. We have resources when we can't figure out how to do our own repairs.

It usually is a cap though.

It often is. I repaired an old HDTV a few years back. The power supply quit, and a little Googling told me that it was probably some caps in the PS. Not all that difficult. Also years ago, a guy I worked with repaired 3 different devices, a garage door remote, at TV, and something else I can't remember, by reflowing some solder joints that looked suspicious.

This story though brought back the time when I built a Ferguson Big Board. Bought the board at a sidewalk sale, and had to fix three shorts in the PCB. Good times!

Reminds me yet again of being 15 years old, building the COSMAC ELF CDP1802-based microcomputer trainer from the Popular Electronics article, getting bored with 256B of RAM, then designing an 8kB 2114-based RAM expansion, UART and RS232/20ma current-loop interface, and saving up for a 2kB integer BASIC interpreter that arrived on 2 2708 1kBx8 EPROMs (which created some consternation on my part, because suddenly I had to come up with +12 and -5 volt supplies for those EPROMs). Then there was the (broken; had to fix the keyboard, first) Teletype model 33ASR, complete with paper tape punch and reader. The I/O for the BASIC interpreter were first entered by hand from front panel switches, then written to paper tape, and thereafter I'd hand-load a 'bootstrap' routine, which would load the BASIC I/O from the paper tape, then jump to the BASIC interpreter proper. Anything I wrote in BASIC was saved to paper tape, because that's what I had at the time. That's when computers were fun. :-)

I remember back in the day when Apple II clones were a thing. There were a number of blank circuit boards (motherboards) available, and soldering all the sockets and caps in was a treat. Had a bit of troubleshooting to do because on mine the silk-screen for the transistors (about 6 of them) was backwards, so the video signal got rapidly lost.

The EPROMs I bought from the electronics store where I bought most of the other parts came helpfully "pre-tested" by having the OS/BASIC already burned in.

Very interesting read. This kind of DIY spirit is definitely missing in modern society. I wonder, for example, how many perfectly good TV's are thrown away because a single capacitor failed out of warranty.I'm only 33, but I remember in my childhood there were radio/TV repair shops. We had them fix fuzzy video output on our C64 once. Nowadays if some gadget isn't working you just buy a new one.

I've made that exact repair to a monitor that broke before (i.e. a single bad capacitor). Also fixed my friend's oven using only the included circuit diagram (to get an idea of where to look for a failure) and a bit of solder (to fix a solder joint that had gone bad).

No need for a repair shop when you've got a basic understanding of electronics and some basic tools.

Information was the thing that destroyed Communism in Eastern Europe. They could have frontier barbed wire and towers with searchlights and machine guns, and they could control copiers.

Before the fall of the Soviet Union a delegation arrived at a large UK company, and were shown around the offices. Over coffee they asked questions of the management. One of the questions was about the copiers they had seen all around the building. How was access to and use of them controlled? How did you stop people just copying illegal material for dissemination among the population, if you had so many machines just lying around? And then, all the typewriters....

But when computers arrived it was all over. The problem with computers was text - it was untraceable Samizdat. You no longer had to get access to copiers and publish on paper.

We laugh about it now, and the stories as in this piece of people finding their way through and around are vivid and entertaining, but we should remember the real effects of the regime that took power after the revolution. The Ukraine famine, concealed, denied, done quite deliberately. The purges, the gulag. Conquest's second edition gives a vivid account. The scale of the thing demanded the participation of the whole country, in the same way that the Nazi program of genocide demanded participation of the whole country. Unlike the Germans they have never come to terms with it, nor did people like Hobsbawm in the West ever come to terms with it.

Isaac Babel epitomizes it. The author of Red Cavalry, as stupidly and ignorantly enthusiastic about violence in pursuit of the cause as any of them, a genius in a bad cause, finally dragged off to die in a camp on some pretext. And that extraordinary speech, where he says that the Party is doing something very important and grave, it is forbidding us to write badly. He meant both things, he still believed, and he could also see that belief was impossible. Its irony, straight down the middle, and he died for it, or maybe it was for having an affair with the wrong woman and so becoming anti-party. As you did in those days.

Romania was a Communist satellite state, not part of the Soviet Union. To some degree all Communist states took orders from Moscow, but surprisingly, sometimes they did not - like for example the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia to which Romania did not participate.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Empire

Romania was a Communist satellite state, not part of the Soviet Union. To some degree all Communist states took orders from Moscow, but surprisingly, sometimes they did not - like for example the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia to which Romania did not participate.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Empire

I was born and raised in Brasov, Romania - the town the CoBra computer originates from. What's more, I went to college there and actually studied under prof. Gheorghe Toacse, the man who was in charge of the team that designed the CoBra and built the first machines.

I remember the story of how the CoBra team presented the thing at some big Soviet science fair in 1988 (the communist equivalent of the World's Fair). The Securitate (the Romanian KGB) warned the team about industrial espionage and advised them to bolt the chassis to the table, which they did. Nevertheless, on the morning of the second day they found the computer opened up and the motherboard removed from the case with the ROM chip(s) missing. Luckily, they had brought spare parts so they could salvage the situation.

I made sure not to read the authours name, just so I can read his/her articles again.

Did anyone do a word count on "Communist"?

She's Romanian, so Romainian Propaganda?

Cool story. Interesting that multiple times they compare themselves to Apple and measure themselves coming up short. The Apple was built in a garage because it was convenient. These guys risked jail time to broaden their knowledge and learn about the outside world. I will love to hear the stories of basement Chinese tinkerers in the decades to come.

Romania was a Communist satellite state, not part of the Soviet Union. To some degree all Communist states took orders from Moscow, but surprisingly, sometimes they did not - like for example the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia to which Romania did not participate.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Empire

Read Hilberg on Rumania.

Thanks for educating me on the subject of Holocaust in Romania, however, a different topic was being discussed here.

I made sure not to read the authours name, just so I can read his/her articles again.

Did anyone do a word count on "Communist"?

It's not propaganda to observe that, while it was communist, Romania had a terrible economy that put home computers out of reach of most ordinary citizens, and that assembling your own required a multitude of legal risks, but was usually officially tolerated. These are all verifiable facts.

Even if this article were written by an American (?) and its political contents not verifiably true, I'm also unclear what you think America would gain from slandering a system of government that died a long time ago, in an EU member state?

I made sure not to read the authours name, just so I can read his/her articles again.

Did anyone do a word count on "Communist"?

As someone who spent his childhood behind the Iron Curtain, I can vouch for the validity of the information presented in this article.

Communism in Eastern Europe actually was a thing, you know, with all its de-humanizing aspects that are unimaginable to someone who didn't experience it first-hand.This was very different from the 21st century communist regime in China where people have smartphones and internet access and air conditioning. This was the hardcore soviet communism of the 1980s, without mass-media, telecommunications, electronics and sometimes even without things that are nowadays considered basic human necessities, like electricity, running water and a heated home. We didn't even know what basic human rights meant until the early 1990s. Most older people (who lived most of their productive adult lives under the communist regime) are still living with that indoctrination, like they are afraid of protests because of how the police might react, afraid to speak out against corrupt public officials because it might somehow have repercussions on their families etc.

Thanks for this great insight into the Eastern European part of early hacker culture. Reading the article threw me back to a nostalgic past of perusing Creative Computing magazines, downloading programmes by recording them on analogue tape via nightly acoustic FM radio broadcasts, connecting to Bulletin Board Systems on my 1200bps modem, reaching out to the early internet over email via a FidoNet gateway, studying The Jargon File and The Whole Earth catalog, playing Infocom games, writing computer viruses, keylogging my teacher's password (it was "cash1234"), disassembling Ultima V and breaking the DRM, writing computer demos and attending copy parties. It was indeed a crazy era and information always wants to be free.